For 18 hours on a rainy Sunday this Halloween weekend, the Metropolitan Opera House was visited by the ghost of Malcolm X.
Words made famous by the Black nationalist leader and civil rights figure in his classic autobiography, dictated to Alex Haley and posthumously published in 1965, could be heard echoing throughout the soaring lobby of the Lincoln Center theater. It was a welcomed haunting, conjured by the Met in conjunction with a new production of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premieres on Friday.
From 6 a.m. until a little after midnight, a starry lineup of Malcolm surrogates — including his daughter Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson and the actor Leslie Odom Jr. — read from the autobiography continuously and in its roughly 500-page entirety.
“I didn’t think that they would do it,” said the director and playwright Robert O’Hara, who staged “Slave Play” and is at the helm’s of the Met’s production. He proposed the reading to the company’s leadership as a way to build word of mouth for the opera. “It’s amazing just to have the words in this space, and for the Met to open its doors and let people come.”
The event was free to attend, and an estimated 680 people cumulatively made their way to the lobby’s Grand Tier balcony, up the undulating, red-carpeted steps and around the low-hanging starburst chandeliers. At 10 a.m., about 100 people sat or stood around a small stage with a black backdrop set up in front of the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows.
Marcia Sells, the Met’s chief diversity officer, said that Sunday was the first time the space had been used for a free event.
“To all these people who are coming in here, to the speakers, to even the Black staff members who have worked here for a long time,” Sells said, “this represents the Met saying, ‘Yes, you really are included.’”
Around 10:30, the actor Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” brought a resounding musicality to an early chapter in which Malcolm details his inauspicious early years as a small-time drug dealer and hustler in Harlem known as Detroit Red.
The actor Courtney B. Vance, of “The People v. O.J. Simpson” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” followed, drawing big laughs with a rousing rendition of a scene in which Malcolm X escapes the World War II draft by feigning madness at the induction office.
“The educated folks had Martin Luther King, but the folks on the street — Malcolm had them,” Vance said in an interview after his reading. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about him and what he stood for and to maybe make people go, Hmm, I want to learn more.”
More than 70 speakers appeared, including Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s grandson; David C. Banks, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; and Liesl Tommy, the director of the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.”
Around 2:30 p.m., Shabazz movingly channeled her father, and received a standing ovation, for a section that recounted his intellectual awakening while confined at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, spurred by a trove of history and philosophy texts.
“It’s a great way to tell my father’s story and to reach different audiences,” she said in an interview. “It’s as relevant now as it was then. We’re still living with the same challenges.”
“X” premiered at New York City Opera in 1986. This revival, which first ran in Detroit in 2021, was conceived by O’Hara as an Afrofuturist fable in which the title character is an archetypical Everyman who transcends time and space. The Met’s production stars the baritone Will Liverman, who opened the Met’s 2021-22 season in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first presentation of a work by a Black composer in its history; Kazem Abdullah will conduct Davis’s score, which was revised for Detroit and changed further for the Met.
Davis said that the aim, then and now, was to present a challenge to opera as an art form, in the spirit of Malcolm himself.
“I wanted to help transform opera into a truly American form, one that reflects African American musical traditions,” he said. “Not only can opera play an important role in music today, it can make statements about who we are and what’s going on in the world.”
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